Last night on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, the host spoke of the decision that’s “Shaken the world, not in a Muhammad Ali-beating-Sonny-Liston kind of way, but more in a those-Ikea-meatballs-you-love-contain-horse kind of way.” He’s speaking, of course, about the Brexit (as he’d also done the weekend prior, likely in the hopes that it’d be a prophylactic, until…well) following the long-awaited vote on June 23, said vote’s surprising outcome (the citizens of England deciding to leave the European Union via a movement that had latched onto people’s legitimate financial woes and disenchantment with the Union, but which had done so largely in order to further an insidious, white nationalist cause), and said outcome’s immediate impact on the now-plummeting British economy.
Oliver begins by showing clips of British reportage from the past weekend, and the somewhat defeated tone it took on as it discussed the deteriorating market and the imminent hunt for a new Prime Minister after David Cameron announced that he’d be resigning due to the decision. The prospect of no more Cameron “should make [one] happy,” says Oliver — but instead he equates it to catching an ice-cream cone out of the air, only to realize it was flying “because a child was hit by a car.”
Oliver certainly isn’t sparing to the “modern compassionate conservative” Prime Minister, as we’d seen in the past in his segment about Piggate — a scandal he exhumed for a joke last night. Oliver notes that, despite Cameron ultimately being anti-Brexit, he initially proposed it; Oliver says, “Cameron proposed the in-or-out choice himself, which he normally only does when he’s deciding whether to fuck a pig’s mouth.” He also launches exquisite insults at the two people whose status the Brexit vote has bolstered: UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farrage and MP Boris Johnson.
“Basically, whoever the next British Prime Minister is going to be, whether it’s Boris Johnson or a racist tea kettle, they are going to be in for a rough two years” — as they’ll have two years to settle negotiations for the exit; Oliver explains that, out of fear of other countries imitating Britain and attempting to secede, the EU may be particularly tough negotiators. He concluded with the fact that the Brexit will soon potentially beleaguer people who’d emigrated and started lives in the UK from elsewhere in Europe because of the free movement of labor laws under the EU — and how they now don’t know what’s in store for their future in the country.
Watch Oliver’s clip: